My beloved fears my work, my studies. She tells me it is evil, wrong. She tries to open that door, “to let the truth out,” she says. Time and again I slam it closed and lock it, and yet again she tries.
Harper imagined the scene: Isabel opening that door, looking down to Soren’s lab and spying him hunched over and dissecting dead bodies stolen from local cemeteries. Screaming at him to stop. That he was evil.
Harper continued reading.
Our babe died last month, and still my beloved Isabel is beset by such melancholia she vows she will never recover.
In his practice, Soren not only treated the local populace as best he could, but he also experimented on them with various botanical concoctions. He was a passionate advocate for the efficacy of homeopathy and microdosing.
If Harper was reading Soren’s nearly illegible handwriting correctly, he had been desperate to treat Isabel, and to that end concocted a tincture combining oleander,Brugmansia, and various other herbs in an alcohol solution. First, though, he tried the tincture out on an unsuspecting male servant. The servant not only survived the treatment but appeared to thrive.
But Soren had failed to take into account that men and women might react differently to his concoction, and that a patient’s body mass affects its efficacy. When he gave the same dose of the tincture to Isabel, she fell into a sleep so deep that Soren believed he had killed her.
I lay my dear sister to rest under the cypress, alongside the dear babe she so mourned, crying as I tossed the dirt upon the coffin. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. Forgive me, my beloved.
Harper looked up from the journal, listening to the storm outside and hoping against hope that what she suspected happened next had not happened. She took a deep breath and continued reading:
I heard the strangest thumpings and moanings, and did begin to believe I was being haunted. Until, having gone out to the garden to place flowers upon my beloved’s grave, I came to the terrible realization that I had been mistaken and had buried my dearest one alive! My dear, sweet Isabel had not been dead but a spark of life still burned within her breast. I fell to my knees and began measures to save her, attempting every means of resuscitation known to medical science, but to no avail. I failed her and she breathed her last in my arms. May she forgive me. May our babe forgive me. May God forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself.
Harper had a sudden, vivid image of the Perles Mansion’s shadowy garden, lit only by silvery moonlight and perhaps a lantern, Soren Perles kneeling in the dirt beneath the branchesof the great cypress tree, holding his dying sister in his arms, shouting out to the heavens for intervention. The anguished cries, the wrenching guilt, the knowledge he had killed her…
Tariq’s phone buzzed, startling her. Harper went to turn his ringer off, so he would not be awakened. It was a text from Penny Paule, the otter wrangler.
They’ve been asking about you again. As to the alibi, babe, no sweat, I’ve got you covered.
Suddenly the lashing wind and rain of the storm seemed much louder. She looked up from Tariq’s phone.
Her front door stood wide open.
Thirty-Two
Harper froze. This was no faulty latch.
Could Asher have returned? No one had entered; one of the blessings of a small apartment was that she would have seen anyone who might have come in. And the little landing outside the door was empty.
Harper…
She heard the voice in her head, just as she had in the Perles Mansion. And then the requiem began, starting low, growing louder.
“What do you want?” Harper heard herself say aloud. She repeated, almost shouting to be heard over the rain: “Isabel? What is it? What do youwant?”
“Harp?” Tariq asked, sounding groggy. “What’s going on?”
Harper went to look out the window.
A woman stood on the lawn outside her apartment, dancing in the rain. But this was not Isabel. This time the womanwore a bright pink gown, emblazoned with turquoise flamingos.
“Ellen?” Harper called out, though surely Ellen could not hear her over the wind and rain.
Tariq came up to stand behind her. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but Ellen’s outside, in the rain,” said Harper, pulling on her boots and slipping a raincoat over her nightgown. “I think she’s sleepwalking.”
“Wait a sec. I’m coming with you.”
Tariq quickly dressed, and they hurried down the stairs. Harper kept an eye out for Isabel’s apparition, but the only one on the lawn was Ellen. She was laughing.
“Don’t startle her or try to wake her up,” Harper warned Tariq. “That can be dangerous to sleepwalkers.”
